2/15/2016

Dead Judge

It doesn't matter if dead Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia loved his family and was loved by them. It doesn't fucking matter if Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg was best buds with him. It doesn't fucking matter that he was smart or funny or that he had a great singing voice or that he could cook like your Italian grandma. It doesn't fucking matter if there were times that Scalia ruled on the side of liberals in free speech or warrantless search cases. None of that fucking matters. Because Antonin Scalia was a poison to the nation, a dick who was proud of how dickish he could be, and the thing that most of us on the left felt upon hearing that he was dead was relief and "Oh, thank fucking Christ." The only difference between you and the Rude Pundit is that you might have felt a little guilt after thinking that. As for the Rude Pundit? Fuck dancing on Scalia's grave. He's ready to have rough anal sex on it before the dirt even settles and then wipe himself off with the pages of a Bible.

Let's put aside Scalia's bitterly pissy dissents, where he sought not just to counter the arguments of the majority but to degrade them, mock them, and bully them. Let's put aside Scalia's place in the conservative party circuit, where he drank and laughed with the political power players and then pretend he'd rule fairly when they came before him. Instead, let's just look at Scalia when he was either writing for the majority or concurring with it, where his cuntistry had the fullest effect on the lives of Americans.

For instance, this is from his majority opinion in a 1995 case upholding a school district's policy of random drug-testing student athletes: "Under the District's Policy, male students produce samples at a urinal along a wall. They remain fully clothed and are only observed from behind, if at all. Female students produce samples in an enclosed stall, with a female monitor standing outside listening only for sounds of tampering. These conditions are nearly identical to those typically encountered in public restrooms, which men, women, and especially schoolchildren use daily. Under such conditions, the privacy interests compromised by the process of obtaining the urine sample are in our view negligible." That's right: Scalia was cool with students being watched or listened to as they piss.

Scalia's constant approval of the state's right to control bodies is genuinely fucking chilling and more than a little creepy, whether it was his support of anti-sodomy laws or his desire to outlaw abortion or his bizarre animosity towards LGBT people, mostly because their fucking offended him.

And then there's Scalia's much-vaunted "originalism," the idea that the Constitution needs to be interpreted based on its original intent in the 18th century. The snarling sarcasm machine could crawl so far up his own ass that, in the Heller decision that struck down the ban on handguns in Washington, DC, Scalia could write, "The 1773 edition of Samuel Johnson’s dictionary defined “arms” as 'weapons of offence, or armour of defence'...At the time of the founding, as now, to 'bear' meant to 'carry.'" Then, in the same opinion, after probing the meaning of the words of the Second Amendment like a a Martian with a fresh earthling anus in front of it, Scalia dismissed that inconvenient first clause: "the adjective 'well-regulated' implies nothing more than the imposition of proper discipline and training."

But that originalism gets tossed out the fucking window when adhering to original intent counters his cruel vision of the world. In his concurrence on Citizens United, the decision that took our already corrupted elections and turned them into cash orgies without a safe word, Scalia addressed the dissenters, who noted that the Founders were not fond of corporations and therefore would not have wanted them to have First Amendment rights. Offered Scalia, "Even if we thought it proper to apply the dissent’s approach of excluding from First Amendment coverage what the Founders disliked, and even if we agreed that the Founders disliked founding-era corporations; modern corporations might not qualify for exclusion. Most of the Founders’ resentment towards corporations was directed at the state-granted monopoly privileges that individually chartered corporations enjoyed."

Do you see what happened there? Scalia said that "modern corporations" are different from the corporations of the time of the Founders, so the Constitution should apply differently. The fuck? By that logic, you should be able to say, "You know, the Founders didn't know that the Second Amendment would apply to owning unlimited AR-15s with giant magazine. They understood muskets." Then you'd have logical consistency. Then you'd have a real judicial philosophy. Instead, Scalia pretended that he believed something about the Constitution that his decisions, time and again, demonstrated that he didn't. Big supporter of state's rights? Fuck that in Bush v. Gore, the decision that set the nation back decades. Belief in habeas rights in Hamdi? Fuck that when it came to Gitmo.

Time and again, Scalia sought to broaden the power of authority over the power of the people. It went hand-in-hand with his deeply-held Catholic beliefs, that you would be judged whether or not you went to Heaven or Hell. Surely, there is a special place down below for a man who wrote, as Scalia did in the 1993 Herrera case, that "there is no basis in text, tradition, or even in contemporary practice (if that were enough) for finding in the Constitution a right to demand judicial consideration of newly discovered evidence of innocence brought forward after conviction." Innocence itself didn't matter to Scalia, and he didn't give a happy rat's fuck if a death row inmate who Scalia thought was a perfect candidate for capital punishment was later exonerated. Shit, you could say that Scalia's decisions caused more deaths than all the serial killers in American history combined.

The Rude Pundit would like to think that Scalia is in Hell now, chained to a bed on his stomach next to William Rehnquist, who looks over at him and says, "Don't worry. After the first few times, you realize that getting ass-fucked by the barbed dicks of demons isn't so bad. Now, the red hot pokers, those'll wake you up." And then he gets to see a liberal take his place on the court.